This article argues that AI-assisted intertextuality should be judged by two linked capacities: the capacity to detect textual relations and the capacity to explain why those relations matter. Its originality is methodological rather than infrastructural: it proposes a constrained division of labor in which deterministic tools discover candidate textual relations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) explains them, and philologists adjudicate the claim. The test case is Coptic monastic literature, especially the writings of Shenoute and Besa, leaders of the White Monastery federation in late antique Egypt. Their works are difficult for non-specialists because Coptic requires segmentation, biblical quotations are often transformed, and scriptural language functions as social authority rather than ornament. Building on Miyagawa’s TRACER-based dissertation and recent THOTH.AI experiments, the article compares TRACER, passim, and RAG. TRACER and passim remain necessary for reproducible large-scale discovery of quotations and near quotations. RAG-based AI contributes differently: it can retrieve lexical and textual evidence, translate and segment Coptic, explain altered wording, and make allusive hypotheses explicit. The article proposes a conservative hybrid workflow: deterministic tools discover candidates, RAG explains them under system-level constraints, and philologists validate the final claim.

AI-generated memetic warfare uses the appeal of memes and the distributive power of social media to reach and influence a wide audience, a tactic seen widely used in the first few months of the 2026 conflict among Iran and Israel and the United States. By analyzing a series of viral videos generated in the same style as the Lego Movie franchise in support of Iran, this paper explores the implications of this new technology on the way we wage war as well as on global economies, the environment, and societal health. I examine the distinctions among propaganda, “slopaganda,” and legitimate protest as well as the relationship between propaganda and social media platforms. I suggest how the humanities may serve not only to resist the unwanted effects of propaganda but also to engender the more desirable empathetic identification and understanding of legitimate protesters, no matter the media they use to draw attention to their cause.

This study employs computational stylometry to empirically trace the evolution of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetic style across three chronological phases: his early lyrics, his middle period centered on In Memoriam A.H.H., and his late epic cycle, Idylls of the King. To investigate these stylistic shifts, the research adopts a hybrid methodology that combines macroscopic distant-reading techniques (using the stylo package in R for Cluster Analysis and PCA) with granular linguistic profiling (using a transformer-based NLP pipeline in Python). The macroscopic analyses reveal a stylistic rupture in the late period; this demonstrates that Tennyson’s epic voice represents a structural departure from the stylistic foundation shared by his early and middle-period works. The Python-based analysis further shows that this late epic style was achieved through an active syntactic reconstruction characterized by increased sentence length, extended dependency distances, a shift from adjectival description to action-oriented verbs, and a heightened density of archaic diction. In contrast, the analyses identify the middle period as a peak in lexical diversity. It is marked by an objective, philosophical tone operating within a regularized syntactic framework. In conclusion, by translating literary concepts such as “lyric” and “epic” into quantifiable linguistic metrics, this digital-humanities approach provides robust empirical evidence that supports and refines traditional critical understandings of Tennyson's dynamic artistic development.

Before K-pop fanfiction tells stories about idols, it teaches fandom how to read them. This article examines that work as narrative labor, the collective transformation of public idol materials into shared conventions of character, relation, and affect. Rather than treating fanfiction as a derivative extension of official content, it asks how fans make idol personae legible through names, gestures, bodily signs, pairings, and recurrent scenes. Drawing on official and paratextual materials and a curated corpus of approximately 1,350 K-pop fanfiction texts, the study combines computational text analysis with interpretive reading. The analysis shows that fanfiction does not simply reflect idol images. It reorganizes them into relational scripts and affective archives that structure recognition, intimacy, hierarchy, desire, and memory. By reframing K-pop fanfiction as an affective infrastructure of legibility, the article contributes to K-pop studies, fanfiction studies, and digital humanities. It also offers an account of fan narrative labor before generative AI became a normalized condition of cultural production, clarifying what platform and AI systems encounter, simulate, or reorganize.

Semantic prosody describes the affective meanings or connotations of a linguistic element, which are commonly understood in terms of positive and negative alignment. Under the view of Construction Grammar, not only individual words but larger linguistic structures may carry semantic and pragmatic meaning, including positive or negative semantic prosody. The present pilot study takes this approach as a point of departure to investigate LLMs’ sensitivity to subtle pragmatic meanings in the form of semantic prosody. 4 state-of-the-art LLMs as well as a human participant group were tasked with rating the connotation and pleasantness of the go-around-Ving construction said to carry negative semantic prosody as well as two syntactically parallel constructions with neutral/positive semantic prosody. Results showed that while LLMs exhibit some sensitivity to constructional semantic prosody, their rating behavior differed significantly from humans when pooled into one group. Compared to humans, LLMs gave higher median and mean connotation and pleasantness ratings while also assigning less neutral ratings across constructions. Although not generalizable due to the exploratory character of this study, the results demonstrate that subtle pragmatic phenomena like semantic prosody represent a promising research area when it comes to discerning LLM language abilities and how they compare to humans’.

This article presents the design and implementation of Digital Korean Studies (DKS) in the Korean Studies department at the University of Vienna, illustrating how digital humanities methods are integrated with the usual curriculum that teaches Korean language, culture, and history to transform both teaching and scholarship. It traces the department’s evolution from a traditional Korean Studies program into a modern, scaffolded curriculum that now also includes transferable digital competencies through teaching Digital Humanities methods that are adapted to Korean Studies students’ interests. The BA curriculum has added Digital Korean Studies courses that introduce the basics of Digital Humanities approaches and methodologies and let’s students absorb this through various hands-on and project-based assignments. The MA curriculum introduces more advanced tools and theoretical grounding, especially in the realm of textual analytics and social network analysis.